William James Mayo Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

A specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less.

William James Mayo
It is a great thing to make scientific discoveries of rare value, but it is even greater to be willing to share these discoveries and to encourage other workers in the same field of scientific research.

William James Mayo
The sciences bring into play the imagination, the building of images in which the reality, of the past is blended with the ideals for the future, and from the picture there springs the prescience of genius.

William James Mayo
Surgery is more a matter of mental grasp than it is of handicraftsmanship.

William James Mayo
The church and the law deal with the yesterdays of life; medicine deals with the tomorrows.

William James Mayo
Given one well-trained physician of the highest type and he will do better work for a thousand people than ten specialists.

William James Mayo
The hospital should be a refuge to which the sick might go for relief as they went before our Savior.

William James Mayo
Reading papers is not for the purpose of showing how much we know and what we are doing, but is an opportunity to learn.

William James Mayo
Experience is the great teacher; unfortunately, experience leaves mental scars, and scar tissue contracts.

William James Mayo
Experience hobbles progress and leads to abandonment of difficult problems; it encourages the initiated to walk on the shady side of the street in the direction of experiences that have been pleasant. Youth without experience attacks the unsolved problems which maturer age with experience avoids, and from the labors of youth comes progress. Youth has dreams and visions, and will not be denied.

William James Mayo
The highly scientific development of this mechanistic age had led perhaps to some loss in appreciation of the individuality of the patient and to trusting largely to the laboratories and outside agencies which tended to make the patient not the hub of the wheel, but a spoke.

William James Mayo
The examining physician often hesitates to make the necessary examination because it involves soiling the finger.

William James Mayo
The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life; the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.

William James Mayo
The man of science in searching for the truth must ever be guided by the cold logic of facts, and be animated by scientific imagination.

William James Mayo
Sometimes I wonder whether today we take sufficient care to make a thorough physical examination before our patient starts off on the round of the laboratories, which have become so necessary that oftentimes we do not fully appreciate the value of our five senses in estimating the condition of the patient.

William James Mayo